We’ve heard a lot before about DevOps and the latest trends in the DevOps world, but what exactly do DevOps engineers do?
In its purest form of existence, DevOps engineers are a bridge between development and operations teams to accelerate delivery efficiency.
What can A DevOps engineer bring to the software lifecycle?
In a traditional delivery cycle, after years of writing code, software developers would hand the software over to the QA team for testing, and then hand the final version over to the operations team for deployment. There is a lack of collaboration between these three phases: development, test, and deployment.
The code written by the development team is ultimately handed over to the operations team, which then fixes any problems that arise during the code deployment process, or it is handed back to the development team to fix any problems that arise. All of this leads to a slowdown in the software development process.
But in DevOps mode, these three teams are no longer isolated. Most of the time, from development, testing, deployment to operations, the engineers involved are merged into a team and throughout the software life cycle, development is no longer limited to a single skill set but a set of technical solutions. This, of course, makes it possible for the security team to work more closely with development and operations throughout the software lifecycle to detect security issues early.
Why are the roles of DevOps engineers different?
DevOps engineers are nothing new. Systems engineers, automation engineers, software engineers, Linux engineers, and so on can become DevOps engineers.
However, the nature of what DevOps engineers do varies from organization to organization. For example, some have a role in infrastructure automation and maintenance, while others have a role in the entire delivery chain.
The role of a DevOps engineer is different because he must collaborate with development and operations personnel by overcoming traditional barriers to collaboration. And different organizations have different barriers, so they play different roles.
Two of the most important aspects of a DevOps engineer’s day job
Although the roles of DevOps engineers vary, almost all DevOps engineers touch on two things every day — automation and continuous integration.
Automation:
Most of the tasks related to maintaining the infrastructure are still manual. Companies prefer to use traditional proven methods rather than automate the same processes because they don’t want to take any risks. But the fact that automated tasks will help develop and deploy software more quickly means that companies can earn money from customers faster.
To illustrate this point, consider the case where a system engineer who manually backs up all his services twice a day as required could do it by writing scripts on the cloud instead of wasting time. By automating the backup process, you can allow systems engineers to focus on important things, such as troubleshooting services that need to be shut down due to some virtual machine problem. Performing the same operations manually will overburden your system engineers, who will be much less efficient. This is just a very simple example of how to illustrate the concept of resource waste by not implementing automation.
DevOps can therefore serve as an extension of Agile because it reduces the risks that can arise due to non-collaboration between developers, QA, and operations teams. DevOps expands the scope of agile principles by recognizing that high-quality software development requires continuous participation and feedback from all stakeholders, including quality assurance and operations experts.
There are many things that can be done automatically, such as updating the ApacheWeb server when a new patch is released, and updating the version of the open source software deployed on the server.
DevOps engineers can automate the process of configuring servers by creating a scripting environment. You can run scripts on one node, but manually running the same scripts on thousands or hundreds of nodes would be impractical. This is where scripting becomes less of an extensible solution.
Therefore, software configuration, configuration management, and application deployment need to be automated across a large number of nodes in a scalable manner. This is where configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible come in handy in the DevOps world.
Continuous integration:
Another important aspect of DevOps is the implementation of continuous integration (CI) in software development practices, which allows developers to constantly update the repository used for automated builds and tests.
Continuous integration systems typically include a tool that continuously monitors version control systems. As soon as a change to the version control system is detected, your application is automatically built and tested. If a build or test fails, the system immediately notifies the developer to fix the problem.
Continuous integration ensures continuous delivery because all code changes are constantly deployed to test and production environments beyond the construction phase.
With continuous integration, developers can be freed from human tasks and become more productive because automated build tasks are now done in an automated manner in CI, and end-user updates can be made faster and more frequently due to more frequent testing, errors, and bugs that are easier to find and resolve.
There are different products and tools that can help you achieve continuous integration in your organization. There are tools that let you host CI servers in your own network infrastructure. The most popular tool was the Jenkins tool, renamed from Sun’s Hudson project.
There are other hosted CI products, such as CircleCI and Travis CI, that are fully hosted in the cloud. These managed CI products are becoming increasingly popular with small organizations because they enable engineering teams to begin continuous integration as quickly as possible.
conclusion
The most important role DevOps engineers play is to bridge the gap between software development and operations teams and speed up software delivery. Although DevOps engineers have different roles in organizations, there are two things in common: automation and continuous integration.